Gossip Girl Business Analysis

“And who am I? That’s one secret I will never tell….You know you love me xoxo Gossip Girl”. Gossip Girl, an anonymous blogger, gives people minute to minute updates on the scandalous lives of the Manhattan Elite. The audience never finds out who Gossip Girl is, until the last Gossip Girl episode made. Like the powerful anonymous blogger Gossip Girl, Alloy Incorporated, the owners of the show, is an influential company whose identity goes unnoticed. Even if one spend years studying the field, the company is easily overlooked since it does not own a major network channel like ABC or NBC. What cannot be overlooked though is the success of its TV programs, which everyone has have heard of. Alloy Inc. is responsible for some of the most influential

teen dramas of our time such as Pretty Little Liars, The Vampire Diaries, and Gossip Girl. Since Alloy does not get much press, the setup of the company and the actual power of the company is virtually unknown to most people. For that reason, the paper will examine Alloy Incorporated through a Production Context Criticism lens.
Production context criticism “seeks answers to how and why television programs programming and organizations have come to be as they are” (VandeBerg, Wenner Granobeck p.

259). Specifically, the paper focuses on the industrial relations critical perspective which looks at the organizational culture of media organizations (Turow 1991). Joe Turow says that, “media organizations must negotiate with other organizations to achieve goals and each negation is an opportunity to gain power” (Turow 1992). There are 13 different types of power roles that he addresses, but he also realizes that sometimes a company can play more than one role. Alloy Inc. does just that. It plays the role of the producer and the creator in the book series and the television series. Alloy only works with other companies for publishing and bringing the actual show to television, which is the main reason the company goes unknown. When it brings the Because of this, Alloy falls under Turow’s category of “permutations in controlling dependence and risk”, where organizations play more than one power role to reduce resource dependence and control risk (Turow

1992).
In order to examine Alloy Incorporated as a company, the paper will specifically focus on the production of Gossip Girl as a franchise. Gossip Girl which transitioned from being a New York Times best seller, to a hit television series, paved the way for Alloy’s new hit-creating business model. In fact, “ in the 50 years preceding Gossip Girl only five different teen book series were tapped for television. In contrast, since the premiere of Gossip Girl in 2007, seventeen books have already found their way on to the small screen, six of them are associated with Alloy Entertainment” (Bindig 2015). The influence of Gossip Girl on the teen television market and Alloy incorporated is undeniable. The paper will first go over business model of Alloy Inc, then show how the company created Gossip Girl from the book series to the show on the CW, and finally how Gossip Girl shaped the future of Alloy Inc.
Alloy as a Business focused on Teens
The creation of Alloy Incorporated is a story that begins in the early 1980s, twenty years before the creation of Gossip Girl. Dan Weiss, an editor who worked with Golden Books and Scholastic, saw an opening in the market for teen girls with an appetite for romance novels. He then started his own packaging company and a series “Sweet Dreams”. In regarding the series Weiss says “I knew what I wanted, and I wanted to craft what I wanted. I wanted Ivory Soap to be Ivory Soap every time” (Mead 2009) Then, he teamed up with Bantam, a mass market paperback imprint publishing company, and dominated the teen romance novel industry by producing up to 500 of these books (Mead 2009). Leslie Morgenstein went to work for Dan Weiss after graduation from Sarah Lawrence in 1989. Weiss told him to take business night classes at NYU and in 1997 he received his MBA (Mead 2009). Three years later, Morgenstein bought his mentor’s company and renamed it 17th Street Company, shortly after the company was acquired by Alloy Inc in 2000. Alloy Inc was first established in 1996 as a marketing company to teens. The CEO of the company, Diamond, says it “promoted teen events, orchestrated online marketing aimed at teens, and sold clothing and other products to teens” (Bindig 2015).Therefore, Alloy Inc. as a company is based on marketing and teens. This idea of focusing on teenagers and making marketable products is vital in understanding the creation of Gossip Girl.
The focus on understanding teenagers began with Morgenstein when he was building 17th Street Productions. Although, he realized that the series Sweet Valley High was successful during its time, he knew that Generation Y would not want to read mass produced novels that came out every week. When creating the business model for 17th Street Productions:
“We thought consumers were more sophisticated. [Teens] wanted their book to feel like Mom’s book—to be printed on decent paper, with a cover that looked like it didn’t have to come from the kids’ section, didn’t have a number on it, and wasn’t embarrassing to be seen with” (Mead 2009).
Morgenstein built his company centered on the fact that what teens want is not too different from what adults want to read. For example, when the Pretty Little Liars series was created, it is said that the plot of the story was based off of the famous show Desperate Housewives. Bringing adult content to the teen world upsets many parents which is why “editors and publishers can get hung up on what’s good for kids,” says Howard, the associate publisher for children fiction at Harper Collins, “At Alloy, they always think first about what kids want to read” (Mead 2009). Alloy is successful because they give teens what they want: sex, drugs, and drama. With no other company producing taboo teen literature in the early 2000s, Alloy became a force to be reckoned with. With the focus of bringing adult content to teens, Alloy was now ready to produce the block buster franchise of Gossip Girl.
Gossip Girl- The book
In an interview with New York Magazine, Cecily Von Ziegsar, the author of the Gossip Girl, says that she was inspired to create the series when she was an editor for 17th Street Productions, which is played off like a “mom and pop shop”.

She wanted to share her experience of attending the small, expensive private school, Nightingale-Bamford in Connecticut (Nussbaum 2004). Little do consumers know, 17th Street Productions is owned by the major marketing company Alloy or that she is not the sole creator of the

series.
In reality the idea for the project originated in a weekly Alloy business meeting filled with about 20 women between the age of 20-30, led by their male ringleader Morgstein, CEO of Alloy Entertainment. Since the CEO’s of the company are all male and they are marketing to teen girls, the women are hired because, "We need ideas from the demographic," CEO Diamond says. "We need people who … have come directly from college” (Business Insider). In a meeting one day the women came up with the idea to have a book about an anonymous blogger and then Cecily von Ziegsar, as an editor for the company, decided to write the series. Von Ziegsar was the author of the first seven books of the series, but after that she is only the creator, meaning she had “ghost writers” write the rest of her novels. This is similar to the production system of Sweet Valley High. The difference is that Alloy Inc. masks the corporate authorship of Gossip Girl. As the CEO of Alloy Entertainment, Morgestein simply made it seem like the series was not mass produced. When taking a closer look though, Alloy’s stamp is all over the creation of the series. For example, when “author” Von Ziegsar is asked about why she wrote a racy teenage novel, she responds “I don’t know what that says about me—that I didn’t mature? Or, no, that’s not fair to the reader. It just says teenagers aren’t that different from adults.” (Nussbaum 2004). This is the central focus of Alloy as a company, yet it is being said through Von Ziegsar as an individual author, not as a worker for Alloy. Therefore, the success of Alloy as a company is its ability to spread its central message of the company through individuals, allowing it to remain behind-the-scenes.
Before giving the first book to the publisher, Cecily had to make sure she gave the publisher the complete Alloy package. It includes the first book finished, storyline summaries for the next two books, and an idea for the cover image, which reveals how when Alloy Inc. makes a product, it expects to make a franchise. This goes back to Alloy’s roots in the marketing business. When Alloy comes up what a new concept, it does not create a single book out of the idea, instead it attempts to create a franchise out of the concept so that is can sell on multiple platforms making it worth the money. The writers of Alloy, also make sure to write with the creation of a TV show in mind since Executive of Alloy Entertainment, Morgstein “is not confident in publishing as an expanding business” (Mead 2009). Once again, this shows how Alloy Inc. wants to make the greatest profit out of each idea. By understanding that books are a dying business and focusing on how they can be made relevant, shaped the writing of Gossip Girl.
Finally, “the series was sold to the highest literary bidder which was Little, Brown, and Company, [not related to Alloy]” (Pattee 2006). The first book “Gossip Girl” was published in 2002 and the final was published in 2009. Four of the books from the series made it on the New York Times bestseller list (Pattee 2006).
Bringing Gossip Girl to Life
Gossip Girl made it to television to when Alloy paired with The CW. The CW was a new station on TV after a recent merger between The WB and The UBN. Both of the companies were already focused on the teen audience of twelve- to thirty-four year old demographic, but they merged to focus on an even narrower audience of eighteen to thirty four (Wee 2010).When The CW began in 2006, it featured the popular teen programs, including One Tree Hill and Veronica Mars (Wee 2010). The new network also saw an opening in the market for a television show that focused on the new screen obsessed Generation Y. This is why The CW signed the new teen television program Gossip Girl to the line up in fall of 2007. Gossip Girl happened to be at the right place at the right time. It was a racier teen novel that focused on the world of computer screens and cellphones